Autonomously Mapping with Visual SLAM
This project is about a low-cost robot that you can drop into a room, have it explore and map the entire space, then set navigating autonomously - all without GPS or lidar.
In this post, I walk through how I built an autonomous indoor mapping robot using the Viam Rover as a base, swapping out the webcam for an RealSense Depth Module D421 and using a Radxa X4 as the central compute (instead of the already-supported Raspberry Pi or Jetson Orin). The robot runs a full ROS 2 stack, including Visual SLAM for map building and Nav2 for autonomous navigation.
While building this robot out, I ran into some interesting challenges around encoder noise and calibration, which I cover in detail. If you want to build one yourself, there's a parts list at the bottom, and all the source code is on GitHub.
This project was built using hardware provided by Intel - thank you, Intel! The choice of hardware was my own, and the purpose of the project was also my idea.